FoodNerd!

What to do with that cup of onion juice? Use it to steam up a bag of baby carrots with salt & pepper, then stick the immersion blender in there and whiz them up with buttermilk. Mix in snipped dill, serve cold. Yum yum. Low fat, low maintenance, highly tasty. It would probably even go nicely as a first course with the kebab kubideh, though if you haven’t so generated onion juice you could probably just steam some onion in with the carrots.

Another armload of cucumbers this week, so in addition to the 4 jars of russian horseradish-dill pickles, I just made another big batch of pickles using my uncle’s special pickling-spice mix. They smell awesome. (His mix is mustard seeds, dill seeds, broken-up bay leaves, allspice, cloves, and hot peppers, from what I can tell.) So I’ve got pickles up the wazoo — good thing I really like pickles. Also palming a few off onto pickle-loving friends…

Continue reading “PickleFest 2004 (duuude)”

This week the market had none of the cuts of meat I wanted, so I bought what was on sale: a beef eye round roast. I wanted something fairly neutral in flavor, since I had a variety of leftovers that needed to go with it, so I got out the new edition of Joy of Cooking and tried their slow-roast recipe. Rub roast with olive oil, liberally salt & pepper, roast at 450 for 10 min then at 250 for 30 min per pound. My 2 pound roast was in for 1 hour 25 min all told, and it’s dreamy. Nice brown salty outsides, moist pinkish insides, very lean, nice for slicing (mmm, sammies — where’s my horseradish?). Blindingly easy, very yummy, probably good for dinner parties too.

Oooh, baby! The recipe in Saveur (March 2004) for Persian ground-meat kebabs sounded just like the delicious treats we get at Molana in Watertown. Finally got to try it out tonight, and it’s terrific. (tallasiandude *really* likes persian kebabs, too, so bonus.) Lacking big flat skewers, I made them into little oblong patties for the grill… they come out moist, light, intensely savory. And I didn’t even use any lamb, just beef. The secrets seem to be finely grated & drained onion, for flavor & moisture, and brushing the patties with saffron-infused butter as they go on the grill, adding that elusive flavor note I associate with Molana-kebabs. Very easy, very impressive for guests, and very delicious.
(I used my immersion blender’s chopper attachment to grate the onion, which didn’t so much grate as reduce to fine puree. Happily, this seemed to be an improvement, as it allowed the kebab texture to be finer. Now I just have to figure out what to do with a cup of onion juice…)

Made last night for B’s birthday dinner — deep dark chocolate flavor, very moist yet still a bit cakey texture. Raves all around. Easy and quick to make, and uses pretty much standard pantry ingredients: chocolate, butter, eggs, vanilla, sugar, all-purpose flour. And no frosting or filling, so no chance of the slumpy vomitous layer cake syndrome which has afflicted my last 3 birthday cakes. (i’m just a loser.)
chocolate fallen souffle cake from February Gourmet chocolate article. The chocolate layer cake from this article was also excellent and intensely chocolatey, which I find rare in cake.

Fellow cooks, one of our group’s father has issued a challenge. He has been working to perfect a vinegar pie crust based on his home ec teacher’s recipe and has asked for our help. I will happily mail out packets containing his wonderful letter, which I know you’ll love because I did, a copy of the original recipe from the 1978 cookbook, his own notes & tweakings and a recipe for fresh pear pie.